After graduating from Tokyo’s Rikkyo (St. Paul’s) University, in 1982 Suo established a movie-production company, Unit 5, that specialized in adult films. He acted as assistant director of 60 such films before making his directorial debut in 1983 with the soft-porn movie Hentai kazoku: aniki no yomesan (Abnormal Family: My Brother’s Wife). In 1989 Suo crossed over into mainstream cinema with Fanshī dansu (Fancy Dance), the story of a musician in a big-city band who, having learned that he must succeed his father as a Buddhist priest, encounters joy and sorrow while undergoing training at a Zen temple.

One of the major influences on Suo was the Japanese film director Ozu Yasujirō. Suo emulated Ozu’s style through the use of such techniques as setting cameras at ground level and giving actors long pauses in conversation. In the 1990s he concentrated on making entertaining movies about people who lived outside the mainstream of Japanese society. Suo wrote and directed Shiko funjatta (1992; also known as Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t), an amusing tale about a young man forced to participate in his university’s lamentably bad sumo wrestling team. Shiko funjatta won a Japanese Academy Award for best film in 1992 and was a surprise hit at the Cannes film festival in 1993.

Suo’s next major success, the 1996 comedy Shall We Dansu? (Shall We Dance?), is about a disillusioned middle-aged businessman who finds escape from his tedious routine by surreptitiously taking ballroom dance classes at night. The film was a box-office hit in Japan and helped to revive the long-stagnant Japanese motion picture industry. It also succeeded in dispelling some of the prejudice that Japanese people held against ballroom dancing, which, as a voice-over in the film explained, “is considered shameful in a country where married people never embrace or say ‘I love you’” in public. Shall We Dansu? was a favourite with audiences at the 1996 Cannes festival and became Suo’s breakthrough hit in the United States in 1997. Suo’s screenplay served as the basis of a 2004 American remake, Shall We Dance?

In 2006 Suo released his first film in a decade. Soredemo boku wa yattenai (I Just Didn’t Do It). Whereas Suo’s earlier films were comedies, Soredemo boku wa yattenai is the story of a young man who proclaims his innocence after being arrested and tried for having sexually molested a young girl on a train. The film was nominated for several Japanese Academy Awards and received numerous other honours.